The Concept of Leela — Why Hindu Gods Love to Play

I have seen men weep in the dirt and laugh through broken teeth. I have seen children wrestle buffaloes in monsoon mud, not because they were told to, but because it seemed like fun. And somewhere, walking the thin line between sorrow and joy, I have come to believe that the gods must be smiling.

I have heard it said, by men whose faces were as brown and lined as walnut shells and who sat cross-legged on jute charpais in their courtyards, that God does not create out of duty or requirement. The logic behind this is that God, being complete and infinite, must not have any need left unfulfilled. So, he creates out of joy. They said the world was played into being, like a child makes a world from dust and pebble and breath.

In the Hindu conception of the world, there is a word: leela. It means play. But not play as in diversion or recreation. Not the kind of play that comes after work. It is the play before work, beyond work—the kind of play a god would invent if he had no need to prove anything. In other words, leela is the divine play—the way the gods create, destroy, love, leave, and return, not from necessity, not from obligation, but out of the simple, untamed joy of being.

And perhaps, that is the first great kindness of Hinduism—that it allows the gods to be human and the humans to be gods. The gods dance, they flirt, they tease, they vanish into forests and reappear disguised as cowherds or mendicants. Krishna steals butter and hearts with the same mischief in his eye. Shiva, ash-smeared and wild-haired, dances destruction and creation into a single rhythm. Even Vishnu, the preserver, descends to earth as fish, boar, prince, or prankster—not because he must, but because he chooses to. And in every choice, there is leela.

There are places in the world where God writes in thunder and fire, where commandments are carved into stone and laws hold like fences against the wild. In those places, a man stands before his maker as a subject before a king—obedient, trembling, righteous if he can manage it. And that is good. For men need fences sometimes, and a strong voice to say what is right and what is ruin. But here, in the dust and smoke of the East, God takes off his crown and plays a flute. He hides in the forest and steals butter from unattended pots. He dances on ashes and wears no shoes. He laughs—not the laugh of mockery, but the warm chuckle of an old friend who sees through your bluff and loves you anyway. And that too, is good.  Each god makes men in his image—not in the shape of their noses or their hands, but in the bend of their spirit. One teaches men how to obey. The other teaches them how to dance. And maybe, all of it is just the way the divine speaks in many tongues, because men need both—the rod and the riddle.

There is something deeply human—and yet entirely beyond human—in this idea that the gods play. There’s something rebellious in that thought. That suffering is not punishment, that joy is not reward, that the whole wretched beauty of life is not a transaction but one long, divine improvisation. That we are not sinners groveling at the feet of heaven, but dancers invited to the stage, expected to miss steps, to fall, to laugh, to try again. And that, perhaps, is the lesson hidden in the leela—that even the gods do not take themselves too seriously.

This is not the kind of lesson we are used to. For we like to turn lessons into ladders, always climbing somewhere—toward success, enlightenment, salvation. But leela does not climb. It spirals. It loops. It turns back on itself like the river that forgets it has already passed this tree and this bend and this patch of sky. And in that looping, there is a gentleness. A suggestion that maybe life is not a trial to endure or a race to win, but a story told for the joy of telling.

Once, a priest who came to my house to perform a puja said, “Even the pain, even the sorrow, is part of the leela.” When asked why the gods do not take themselves more seriously, he looked puzzled. “Would you rather,” he said, “a god who never danced?”

And I thought then of my country, where men sweat and weep and pray to clocks and mortgages, and I wondered if perhaps we have lost something—not faith, for the temples still ring with bells and the queues are long and patient—but the divine absurdity of it all. The willingness to let the world be mysterious, to let God be a storyteller rather than a schoolmaster.

Because in the end, leela is not chaos. It is not mockery. It is the highest order disguised as delight. It is the humility of a god who says, “Let me come down, let me dance with you, let me forget I am god and you are man, let us be children again.”

And we—we play our part too, not only in the quiet dramas of daily life but quite literally, in the open-air stages of festival grounds. Every year, when little boys don crowns and paste-on mustaches to become Rama or Ravana, when arrows of fire light up Dussehra skies, and the town gathers to watch the Ramleela unfold, we are not just remembering a story. We are reenacting the leela, echoing the gods with cardboard swords and painted faces, reminding ourselves that life itself is a kind of divine theater. Every year, we come to watch the same story retold; and every year, the boys bicker over who gets to play the hero, Rama.

And if there is anything holy left in this tired, angry world, it is this: that somewhere, a boy with a flute and a feather in his hair is still playing, and the cows are still listening, and the butter is still missing from the pot—and no one, not even the stars, wants to stop the game. 

Maybe the gods never left. Maybe, they’re playing hide and seek—and we’ve just forgotten how to seek.